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Sharon McCarthy

GROWTH STRATEGIST

VP OF MARKETING

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the strategic expertise of a big brand with the creativity and agility of a startup

Confusing Confidence with Competence

Confusing Confidence with Competence

One Question to Avoid Hiring Dunning Kruger as Your CMO Dunning Kruger is a term in psychology to describe how people often believe they are smarter and more capable than they really are. Since as a culture, we often confuse confidence with competence, when you're interviewing a potential CMO -- or anyone -- how do you know who’s really competent, and who’s just confident? Who flew standby on a rocket ship, and who landed a plane on the Hudson? Compounding the confusion is

Do You Have a Prototype or an MVP?

Do You Have a Prototype or an MVP?

In a recent post on Linked In, Rand Fishkin, SEO pioneer and founder of Moz, described what happens when you launch a bad MVP. While I agree with Rand's point, I disagree that a lousy MVP is really an MVP at all -- it's a prototype. An MVP is a product with a core group of raving fans (like the Seahawk fans below). It's not a working prototype. It was developed from a series of build-test-learn cycles that started with a prototype. The product is truly unique, and customers

The Beginners Guide to PPC

Podcast Advertising - 10 Questions to Ask

Podcast Advertising - 10 Questions to Ask

We have entered the golden age of podcasting. Listeners now have a wide variety of high quality, deeply engaging programming to choose from, and listen habitually at high rates of completion. So marketers have begun to take notice, driving ad spending on podcasting 86% over 2016. However podcasting still remains a relatively uncluttered advertising environment, as measured by my "clutter ratio", calculated by dividing the % of consumers using a medium, by the % of media dolla

UnBEARable - Lessons From Build-A-Bear

UnBEARable - Lessons From Build-A-Bear

There is nothing more powerful in retail than a line out the door. Like the McDonald's 1 million burgers sold sign or the number of reviews in an app store, lines out the door provide what Robert Cialdini calls "social proof", the phenomenon by which we do what other people do simply because we think they know better. Which means, the lines outside the Build-A-Bear stores for it's recent "Pay Your Age" promotion only accelerated sales by causing more customers to join the lin

the strategic expertise of a big brand, the creativity and agility of a startup